An Italian affair

At six lines - a sixain, the old books do say - the possibilities for the stanza increase. We find a verse made by adding a quatrain to a couplet, a-b-a-b-c-c, a grouping which looks very like the latter part, the sestet, of a Shakespearean sonnet. And we find Burns's famous stanza:

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie,

O, what a panic's in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi' bickering brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,

Wi' murd'ring pattle !

The poet is addressing a mouse, "On turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough". Four rhyme-words are needed for the longer lines, which makes this a good satirical stanza. Whatever the use, it will always remind us of Burns, just as terza rima will always remind us of Dante.

A seven-line stanza (for which the word septet is sometimes used, although the OED does not register this meaning) would seem to enlarge the possibilities still further. Here is the Dorset dialect poet William Barnes (1801-86) addressing "The Clote", the waterlily:

O zummer clote! when the brook's a-glidèn

So slow an's smoth down his zedgy bed,

Upon thy broad leaves so seäfe a-ridèn

The water's top wi' thy yollow head,

By alder's heads, O,

An' bulrush beds, O,

Thou then dost float, goolden zummer clote!

There must be a vast number of variants of such a disposition of lines, each one capable of yielding its own characteristic movement. And yet one does not see a seven-line stanza used often.

One historically important seven-line stanza is rhyme royal, which was employed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, and by Auden in his "Letter to Lord Byron". The latter use comes as a surprise because Auden was imitating Byron's comic manner in Don Juan, a poem written in ottava rima. Rhyme royal is rhymed in the following way: a-b-a-b-b-c-c, so its overall effect is very like ottava rima, which is rhymed a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c. The difference between these two stanzas might be a small thing if you were writing in Italian. In English, in a poem of any length, the difference is significant, because rhyme royal relieves the poet of the task of providing two sets of three rhymes in each stanza, as in ottava rima.

In an inflected language such as Italian, a word may rhyme simply because it has the same grammatical form as another, simply because it terminates in - ato or -ando or - are (these are all feminine rhymes). It follows from this that there are innumerable possible rhymes in Italian, and that these rhymes do not necessarily have great significance. In English poetry, with its reliance on masculine rhymes, rhymes themselves are harder to find, and they have a rather higher degree of significance.

In Italian, ottava rima was used without problem as the metre of long romances, because it was easy to find two sets of three rhyme-words. In fact, the problem is no greater than with terza rima. In English, Byron found that although it was a taxing business to write long poems in big stanzas, the situation was transformed entirely if the poem was satirical or otherwise absurd: if preposterous rhymes were admitted, things went with a tremendous zip. Just as Eliot and Heaney, when imitating Dante, chose not to copy his rhyme-scheme, so Auden (but rather more surprisingly) chose not to try to rival Byron's ottava rima, but to shave off a line and use rhyme royal instead. In all likelihood, very few people noticed.

Here is the opening of Canto VII of Don Juan , to illustrate the way Byron can move from mock-elevated to conversational within his chosen form:

Oh, Love! Oh Glory! What are ye who fly

Around us ever, rarely to alight?

There's not a meteor in the polar sky

Of such transcendent and more fleeting flight.

Chill and chained to cold earth, we lift on high

Our eyes in search of either lovely light.

A thousand and a thousand colours they

Assume, then leave us on our freezing way.

And such as they are, such my present tale is, A nondescript and ever varying rhyme,

A versified aurora borealis,

Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime.

When we know what all are, we must bewail us,

But ne'ertheless I hope it is no crime

To laugh at all things, for I wish to know

What after all are all things - but a show?

They accuse me - me - the present writer of

The present poem of - I know not what -

A tendency to underrate and scoff

At human power and virtue and all that;

And this they say in language rather rough.

Good God! I wonder what they would be at!...

And so on. Byron's most attractive works, to the modern reader, are those in which we can hear his conversational tone of voice: that is, in his letters and in Don Juan .

A stanza of eight lines (as for instance in Marvell's "The Garden") is called an octave. Sicilian octaves rhyme thus: a-b-a-b-a-b-a-b. A nightmare for the English poet.

· This is an edited extract from James Fenton's book An Introduction to English Poetry (Viking, £14.99).